Where did the summer go? Thanks to a July struggle with gout and a September session of covid, mine seemed short. But I’m grateful for an August spell in Alaska and a June trip that covered bassy parts of Canada and turned-out-to-be-trouty parts of the Adirondacks. That's right – in the same area where we struck out in August 21, we caught brook trout! A whole three of them!!
Yes, we’re talking about the beautiful water on private land in the Adirondacks where no amount of effort last August would produce a trout strike (see previous post). It would be hard to dream up a troutier pond: cool burbling inlets, deep holes, down trees, overhanging brush, and a nice wide, slow-moving outlet. Yet my friend and I put serious time last year into proving that you could flail the pond with dries, nymphs, streamers, and gear and still come up with nothing except excuses. The water was too warm. The days were too bright, or too windy. Lots of loons. Poachers!
So, you might say, try again in spring when the water is still cool. To the degree that early June is still spring, we did that this year – with results! Just a few casts off the small wooden dock with a black wooly bugger, and we had our proof that at least ONE trout was still alive in that pristine pond.
For a New York minute it looked like maybe the cooler water was going to unlock our fishing attempts and help collect useful survey results on the trout population. Or, maybe not. We spent another hour or so casting that same evening, and came back with a canoe the next (very windy) day, and returned again to fish a good chunk of the shoreline in spitting rain on a cold grey day, all without another single positive result.
To be fair, the day out there with the canoe was so gusty that meaningful fishing was nearly impossible. On open water we got blown along as a jogging pace and were only able to paddle against the wind roughly at a slug’s pace. The only way to put any concentrated effort into an area was to get back on land, so we found a nice big rock to stand on. Here come the excuses again, but it’s true that fishing near trees limits a fly-fisher’s casting room, and after a few minutes on the rocks my esteemed professor friend found spin fishing’s most solid limitation: the bottom of the pond. Isn’t it a mystery how a great scientific mind accustomed to analysis and careful procedures can suddenly find itself facing challenges in understanding that a significantly heavy lure (it was a Rapala jig) must needs be retrieved fairly quickly to stay up off the bottom? I decided to be a dick and insist that, instead of cutting the line, we needed to make every effort to get the lure free (I only had two and did really want to try them on walleye in Canada later on) so the professor was urged to launch the canoe with the idea being that he’d go get the lure free and then come back to get me while I stood on the rocks holding the spin rod. What happened instead was such a comedy that I deeply rue not trying to film it: as soon as he sat his healthy physical person in the stern, the bow went sharply up and immediately caught a really powerful sudden gust of wind. This fierce wind twisted the canoe around in a flash and was pushing the professor wicked fast toward the outlet, a rock-strewn place where current would have been added to a canoe hull’s complications. Science triumphed with a couple strong sweep strokes to beach the bow on shore (nice paddling professor!), where the gusts were waited out and where my laughter did eventually die down to where I cracked up only once every three or four minutes thinking about the scene.
After all that good fun and a nice diet of convivial beers and whisky, I was genuinely sad to say goodbye to the professor the next day when he returned to his classrooms. On the other hand, I’d be lying if I said I weren’t happy to have the quiet cabin in that amazing place all to myself for a little while. I took advantage of the time to zip around in a kayak and prove that the main pond was still overrun with largemouth bass. But the trout mystery continued to itch in my mind. Why just one fish? What were we doing wrong? Did I really not know how to catch brook trout, after growing up in Maine and spending dozens of years catching them from Baxter State Park to Tierra del Fuego? Not to divulge anything that might run me afoul of any authorities, but it is a fact that there at the cabin I had in my possession a small amount of mushroom powder. I decided it was time to deploy this magic dust in the service of science, to open and recharge a mind running in futile grooves and help it devise a new method of catching trout. And when the answer later appeared vividly in my mind amid images of electric greens and sexy trees (don't ask), I literally slapped myself on the head for the obviousness of it: moving water!! True, brookies do like stillwater and can even breed in it, and true, the moving water near these ponds was small and limited. But we hadn’t even tried the creek!
Thanks to this simple bit of inspiration, two more samples were collected. It took some joyful work bushwhacking through the brush to find a bit of casting/dapping room, and the ratio of creek chubs to brookies was nearly ten to one. But to your correspondent’s great satisfaction, two tiny but beautiful specimens of salvelinus fontinalis somehow got their mouths around a size 18 ant pattern and allowed themselves to be photographed and recorded.
These healthy juvenile brook trout were swimming just a long stone’s throw from where the creek mouth empties into a pond full of hungry largemouth bass (I had caught several bass right near that outlet on the previous night). Also, they were swimming a babbling half mile or so downstream from the small pond where we had caught the first (significantly larger) brookie. What this says for science and for any practical plans to try and encourage the thriving and expansion of the brook trout is a bit beyond the comprehension of my unmushroomed mind, and is probably best left to the professor and his cohort. But I can say that catching those little jewels and holding them for a moment in a wet palm of the hand felt like finding the last piece of a fascinating but frustrating puzzle. In other words, though the catch was measured in low-digit inches, it was fishing at its very best.
